The present invention relates generally to mobile communications, and, more particularly, to a system for generating timing events in mobile communication network.
Recent mobile communication networks have been developed to operate according to various mobile telephony standards, viz., wideband code division multiple access (W-CDMA), narrowband CDMA (N-CDMA), global system for mobile communications (GSM), and long term evolution (LTE). These different standards use different frame structures to count sub-frames in a frame, count slots in a sub-frame, count chips in a slot, and count symbols in a slot, and these differing frame structures necessitate the use of different timing event generation schemes.
Timing events usually are generated by a radio-frequency (RF) timer that is integrated in an user equipment (UE) or a base station. The RF timer generates the timing events using a hardware timing event generation logic circuit. The base station starts transmission and reception based on the timing events from the RF timer, and the UE transmits and receives data from the base station based on these generated timing events. Using a hardware timing event generation logic circuit causes the UE or the base station to be compatible only with a single cellular network. For example, a base station or UE that includes a hardware circuit connected to a GSM network will be compatible with the GSM network alone and is not operable with other cellular networks.
The operation of a UE across multiple standards may be enabled with a multi-mode UE. However, manufacturing economical and ergonomic multi-mode UEs has many challenges. Due to wide differences in base band processing across different standards, hardware sharing inside a multi-mode UE is a difficult task, requiring integrating separate hardware components for each standard, which substantially increases the price and size of the UE. Presently, there is no system to render the base station compatible with multiple cellular networks. Thus, multiple base stations are installed and maintained for operating in multiple cellular networks, which further increases operational costs.
Therefore, it would be advantageous to have a system and method for generating timing events in either or both a UE and a base station that supports multiple mobile telephony standards.